We have gotten several reports of potentially serious problems with Symantec's new Norton AntiVirus for Macintosh (NAVM). No two reports are identical, but they all have a similar theme. I cannot yet confirm how isolated or widespread these problems may be:

Larry Yager writes: "The NAVM scan works fine and shows no problem. But when I then run Disk First Aid, I receive a message that the disk need to be repaired. I get the message 'Missing file record for file thread xxxxx,xxx' (the number changes each time I repair and then run NAVM again)."

Peter Holzberger writes: "When running Norton Utilities 3.52 after installing NAVM 5.0, recurring error messages appear: 'An error was found in an alias record in the catalogue B tree' and 'An error was found in the header node in the catalog B tree.' No sooner does Norton Utilities fix the problem, then it returns. The only fix to this problem was to deinstall NAVM 5.0. On one occasion, the Performa crashed while I was trying to repair the error, and I could not repair it so I had to reinitialize the hard drive."

Jim Carr writes: "Running NAVM 5.0 (using June 1 definitions) with Mac OS 8.1, I have twice frozen and had to kill a scan at about 90% complete. After the first freeze, Norton Utilities found and fixed file system errors beyond count on that drive and every other drive on this system. After repairs were completed, I used ResEdit to look at the drive being scanned - since a faulty resource fork had been reported in a file in an invisible root level folder called" NAV:temp scan folder." When I made the folder visible, I found it had copied 196 items worth 75 megs to that folder. Trashed it and emptied trash. Restarted." The problem recurred at the next scan.

Mark Goldberg reports that NAVM triggered corruption of his disk that was "almost unrepairable" by Norton Utilities.

Update: We have already gotten six more reports confirming these problems. More details next time.